Yoast SEO Pricing: Free vs Premium vs AI+ Costs Explained
Yoast SEO pricing confuses a lot of WordPress users because the plugin has a genuinely useful free version, a paid Premium tier, and a newer AI+ bundle that adds generative AI features. The core question is rarely "how much does Yoast cost?" but "which tier actually pays for itself?"
This guide breaks down every Yoast SEO plan, what you get at each level, renewal pricing, and how to decide whether the upgrade is worth it for your site.
Yoast SEO Pricing at a Glance
Yoast SEO Pricing: Free vs Premium vs AI+ Costs - Yoast SEO Pricing at a Glance.
Yoast currently structures its WordPress pricing around three main tiers:
| Plan | Annual Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Yoast SEO Free | $0 | Beginners, hobby blogs, single-author sites |
| Yoast SEO Premium | $99/year | Serious bloggers, small businesses, content teams |
| Yoast SEO AI+ | $358.8/year | Teams that want AI drafting plus Premium features |
Prices are listed in EUR, USD, and GBP at the same numeric value, so a Premium license costs 99 EUR, 99 USD, or 99 GBP depending on your region. Yoast also offers separate pricing for Shopify and WooCommerce users, which we cover below.
Yoast SEO Free: What You Actually Get
Yoast SEO Free is not a stripped demo. It includes the core on-page optimization workflow that made the plugin famous:
- SEO analysis with traffic light scores for readability and keyword usage
- XML sitemap generation
- Canonical URL controls
- Basic schema markup
- Meta title and description fields
- Breadcrumb controls
- llms.txt support for AI search readiness
The free version works well for a single author who publishes occasionally and is willing to do the optimization work manually. The limitation is that everything stays manual: you write every meta description, find every internal link yourself, and handle redirects through another plugin or your host.
Yoast SEO Premium: $99 Per Year
Yoast SEO Pricing: Free vs Premium vs AI+ Costs - Yoast SEO Premium: $99 Per Year.
Yoast SEO Premium costs 99 EUR/USD/GBP per year for one site. That price includes the Premium plugin, the Local SEO, News SEO, and Video SEO plugins, one seat for the Google Docs add-on, full Yoast SEO Academy access, and 24/7 support.
What Premium Adds Over Free
The Premium tier is built around removing manual SEO chores:
- Redirect manager: When you move or delete a page, Yoast prompts you to create a redirect. You can also import redirects in bulk via CSV.
- Internal linking suggestions: Yoast scans your site and recommends relevant pages to link to as you write. The orphaned content workout shows posts with no inbound links.
- Up to five keyphrases per page: Free Yoast checks one keyphrase. Premium checks five, including synonyms and word forms across 20+ languages.
- Bulk AI metadata drafting: Filter pages missing titles or descriptions, let AI draft them, then approve in bulk. Nothing saves without your review.
- Content Planner: Generates five content ideas from your own site and builds a structured starter draft.
- Social preview customization: See and adjust how posts appear on Facebook and X before publishing.
- Schema aggregation: Combines your site's structured data into one deduplicated graph so AI systems can read a complete picture in one request.
- Bot blocker: Choose which AI systems may use your content for training.
- 24/7 expert support: Staffed by people who work on SEO daily, with no queue system.
Premium Renewal Pricing
Yoast Premium renews at the same 99 EUR/USD/GBP rate each year. There is no lifetime license. If you let the subscription lapse, you keep the plugin installed but lose updates, support, and access to the connected services.
Additional Team Seats
One Google Docs add-on seat is included with Premium. Additional seats cost $5 per month per person, excluding VAT. This matters for agencies or content teams where multiple writers need to optimize drafts without WordPress access.
Yoast SEO AI+: $358.8 Per Year
The AI+ bundle includes everything in Premium plus Yoast's generative AI features and AI Brand Insights. At 358.8 EUR/USD/GBP per year, it is roughly 3.6 times the cost of Premium.
What AI+ Adds
- AI Optimize: Suggests specific changes for Yoast SEO assessments, such as keyword placement in the introduction, keyword distribution, and keyword density. You can apply or dismiss each suggestion.
- AI Brand Insights: Monitors how your brand appears in AI platforms and LLMs, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.
- Generative AI for titles and meta descriptions: Creates SEO-optimized metadata at scale, with human review before anything saves.
AI+ makes sense if you already use Premium and want AI assistance inside the WordPress editor rather than in a separate tool. If you are mainly interested in AI content generation, however, the value proposition gets murkier, which we address below.
Yoast SEO for Shopify and WooCommerce Pricing
Yoast sells platform-specific products outside the standard WordPress pricing:
- Yoast SEO for Shopify: A separate subscription for Shopify stores. It includes AI-generated product titles and descriptions, product structured data, and tailored ecommerce content analysis. Pricing is listed on the Yoast shop and differs from the WordPress plans.
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO: An add-on for WooCommerce stores that adds product structured data, automated product sitemaps, and ecommerce-specific content analysis. It is included in the AI+ bundle or sold separately.
If you run an online store, compare these against the standard Premium plan carefully. The WooCommerce add-on only matters if you are on WordPress with WooCommerce; Shopify users need the Shopify-specific product.
Yoast SEO Pricing vs. What You Could Build Yourself
A useful way to evaluate Yoast SEO pricing is to estimate what the manual work would cost you.
A freelancer writing 50 meta descriptions at 5 minutes each spends over 4 hours. At a conservative $40/hour, that is $160 of labor. Premium's bulk AI metadata drafting handles the same task in minutes, which means the $99 annual fee can pay for itself with one metadata cleanup pass.
The same logic applies to redirects. One missed redirect after a site migration can cost rankings and traffic that take months to recover. Premium's redirect manager reduces that risk to a prompt in the editor.
Where the calculation gets weaker is AI content generation. Yoast AI+ helps you optimize and draft metadata, but it does not research topics, map your market, or publish a steady stream of new content. That is a different job than on-page optimization.
If your bottleneck is producing enough useful content rather than optimizing what exists, a platform like AgentBooks takes a different approach. It learns your product, researches organic search results, plans topics, and continuously publishes content in your brand voice. Yoast optimizes pages you write; AgentBooks produces the pages themselves. Many teams end up using both: one for content production, one for on-page refinement.
Yoast SEO Pricing: Which Tier Should You Pick?
Choose Free If
- You publish occasionally and have time to optimize manually
- Your site is new and you are testing whether SEO matters for your niche
- Budget is zero and you accept the manual workload
Choose Premium If
- You publish weekly or more and metadata, redirects, and internal links are piling up
- You manage a site with hundreds of older posts that need cleanup
- You want 24/7 support and structured training through Yoast SEO Academy
- You need Local, News, or Video SEO without buying separate plugins
Choose AI+ If
- You already use Premium and want AI suggestions inside the WordPress editor
- You need to monitor brand visibility in AI answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity
- The 358.8 EUR annual cost is trivial compared to your content team's time
Consider a Different Approach If
- Your main problem is producing enough content, not optimizing it
- You want a system that researches topics and publishes autonomously
- You prefer a subscription that scales content output rather than adding editor features
For teams in that last bucket, AgentBooks positions itself as an autonomous content growth platform. It starts with a free beta tier that includes brand research, keyword planning, and a hosted content site, then scales to Pro at $29/month for advanced SEO optimization and multilingual publishing. The comparison is not Yoast versus AgentBooks directly; they solve adjacent problems. Yoast refines pages you create. AgentBooks creates pages you would otherwise never get to.
Yoast SEO Pricing FAQ
Is Yoast SEO really free?
Yes. The free version includes on-page SEO analysis, XML sitemaps, canonical controls, basic schema, and meta fields. You can run a functional SEO workflow without paying anything.
How much does Yoast SEO Premium cost per year?
Yoast SEO Premium costs 99 EUR, 99 USD, or 99 GBP per year for one site. The price is the same numeric value across currencies.
Does Yoast SEO Premium renew automatically?
Yes. The subscription renews annually at the same rate unless you cancel. Lapsed subscriptions lose updates, support, and connected services.
Can I use Yoast SEO Premium on multiple sites?
One subscription covers one site or domain. You can buy multiple subscriptions at checkout, and bulk purchases qualify for a discount. Staging sites are supported by transferring your subscription between live and development URLs in MyYoast.
What is the difference between Yoast SEO Premium and AI+?
AI+ includes everything in Premium plus generative AI features like AI Optimize, AI Brand Insights, and AI-generated titles and meta descriptions. AI+ costs 358.8 EUR/USD/GBP per year.
Does Yoast SEO work on Shopify?
Yoast offers a separate Yoast SEO for Shopify product with Shopify-specific pricing. The WordPress Premium plugin does not run on Shopify.
Is Yoast SEO Premium worth it for a small blog?
If you publish consistently and have a growing archive, the redirect manager, internal linking suggestions, and bulk metadata tools usually save more time than the $99 annual cost. If you publish rarely, the free version may be enough.
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Sources and further reading
- Yoast SEO Premium - Designed for in-house marketers, creators, and entrepreneurs using WordPress. Get real-time SEO guidance, AI-assisted content optimization, and Local, News & Video SEO in Yoast SEO Premium. No expert knowledge needed.
- How much does Yoast SEO cost? - Yoast SEO is free! Yoast SEO Premium costs 99 EUR for a whole year’s access to great features, 24/7 support and all the Yoast SEO Academy courses!
- Browse the Yoast Shop - Browse all Yoast SEO products. Let Yoast help you improve your site's SEO with AI-powered tools, guidance and 24/7 support
Conclusion
Yoast SEO pricing is straightforward once you separate the three tiers: Free for manual optimization, Premium at $99/year for automation and support, and AI+ at $358.8/year for generative AI features and brand monitoring in AI answers.
The right choice depends on where your bottleneck is. If optimization chores are slowing you down, Premium is a high-value upgrade. If content production is the real constraint, pair Yoast with a content engine like AgentBooks rather than expecting an on-page plugin to solve a publishing problem. Most growing sites eventually need both: a system that creates content consistently and a tool that keeps every page technically sound.